All Blog Posts (11,362)

I was born and raised in The Netherlands, and my painless deconfessionalization story will sound familiar to many people who have lived in that odd little country during the last decades of the twentieth century.

I can’t have been more than three years old when one day, my older brother coming home from playschool solemnly preached: ‘God sees everything’. His teacher had told him so, and in those days Missy ranked as the highest authority in scientific matters. I didn’t seem to like… Continue

Outwardly, Barack Obama projects an image of himself as a good Christian man. He goes to church on Sunday and proclaims "God bless America". This has me wondering, is this a means to an end, or is Barack a true believer? After all, the young Barack was raised by a woman who, if not an atheist, was at the very least, agnostic. Ann Dunham, his mother, was a freethinker who was unencumbered by strong ties to a particular religion. She introduced Barack not just to one particular religion, but to… Continue

City group has cut half of its European leveraged finance team in London, reducing the group to 14 from 27. As many as seven of those cut will be reassigned to other areas in the investment bank, a source close to the situation said. The jobs that were cut were largely junior roles. Spokesman declined to comment on the job cuts. The cuts reflect the sluggishness of the leveraged finance markets, especially in Europe, and the fact that banks don't expect the primary markets to rebound anytime… Continue

FRAUD: THE MYTH OF SAINT PETER—the man who never was.
ORIGINS OF RELIGIONS, PART 4
Barbara Walker, in her opus The woman’s encyclopedia of myths and secrets. (1993. Harper and Row) wrote about the fancy and fiction of St. Peter who we may call “the man who never was”.

“The myth of Saint Peter was the slender thread from which hung the whole weighty structure of the Roman papacy. One solitary passage in the Gospel of Matthew said Jesus made a pun by giving Simon son of Jonah… Continue

I've been wondering for some time now, when did I start believing in God? I know exactly when I stopped, like most people on this site. It's a lot harder to break the spell of culture and what I learned from my family after some 30 years of being immersed in the idea of Jesus.

As a Hispanic girl in Southern California, I was naturally raised as a Catholic. I remember Sunday churches and early morning breakfasts with the family. I remember going to Catechism school on Wednesday… Continue

The Hindu god Hanuman also known as Anjaneya the son of Anjana is made the chairman of the recently opened Sardar Bhagat College of Technology and Management in northern India.
What is the work of a chairman? According to Wikipedia, a chairman "presides over meetings of the assembled group and conducts its business in an orderly fashion.When the group is not in session, the chairman's duties often including acting as its head, its representative to the…Continue

Living in Indiana, whenever I go to the grocery store on Sundays I am reminded of how my rights have been compromised by the religious. I am unable to buy liquor on Sundays. While it may seem a minor inconvenience, it is a concrete and glaring manifestation of a failure of separate of church and state. To quote the wikipedia article on blue laws:

Many states still prohibit selling alcohol on Sunday, or at least before noon on…Continue

YOUR ONLY LORD AND SAVIOR IS YOURSELF

so be polite

Imagine you have an apple pie and that there are six people that want a piece. It seems obvious that if you’re a fair person, you would go ahead and divide the pie in six equal pieces. This is how small groups of individuals make compromises that allow each person to have an equal opportunity, in… Continue

The first few decades in the history of the mormon church are truly remarkable. It is an example of religious bigotry at it's finest. The mormons were run from state to state, being driven out eventually by the other 'god fearing' people of those states. New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois...in each state, mobs of religious people gathered to drive the mormons out. The efforts became increasingly worse, until in Missouri the governor of the state issued the 'Extermination… Continue

I don't know how many might know about the show Monster Quest on the History Channel. Well my sister is the producer of the next season, which is really cool. I must admit that I have not seen the show, although I have looked over the website. From looking, the show is presented as being investigative, using technology to check the claims and such, but I don't know really if they have a bias towards or against the creatures they are… Continue

After my first posting the day I joined Nexus, someone asked, "What is a metaphysical naturalist?" He could as easily have asked, "What is a naturalist?"
There are many kinds of naturalists, which for almost 3000 years has meant that whether or not a god exists, everything in the world is natural and operates on natural laws.
But actual, true atheism was almost unheard of in ancient Greece. Atheism was the mere denial that the many thousands of gods that were believed to exist had… Continue

Labels to me are nothing but ways to make excuses for the things you choose to do. Thats it. Not only religiously, spirtually, mundane.. whatever..a label is a label and its nothing more than an excuse for me to do the things that I want to do.

Why is it that humans must confine themselves to one way of thinking? Why cant everything be limitless? Why must there be limits to our thinking..

Tell me: Why is what is wrong wrong and why is what is right right? Its philosophy… Continue

Thanks to The Good Atheists for having a link to this website. I've blogged my random musings on religion and politics on my MySpace, but I always have the feeling I'm alienating myself from my friends who seem content with just cruising through life. And especially my friends who are Christians, but not the bible-thumping, proselytizing types.

I can't wait to find time to actually write out some of my thoughts here. Especially the question that's been plaguing me for the last week,… Continue

I've given myself such a massive overdose of the news in the past couple of months that I feel like my brain has a mind of its own, constantly debating this and that issue with nonexistent opponents. Up until I forced myself to start paying attention so that I would be an informed voter (and actually watched and paid attention to debates for the first time in my young life) I never, ever kept up with any sort of news and avoided tv mainstream media like the plague, forcing others to turn it off… Continue

California's bigots passed Proposition 8, a state constitutional amendment to strip the existing right to marry from same-sex couples. Californians must be so proud. On Tuesday, they demonstrated to the world that one can be mature enough to elect a black man as President, and still be diseased with bigotry. While no longer fashionable to spit on black people, apparently it is still popular in the US to spit on gay people. So popular, in fact, that we can still pass laws keeping them just shy… Continue

Working at a car dealership lets me take the pulse of the surrounding community. Their strongest concerns are no longer confined to the buttons worn as a fashion accessory as they were in the eighties, but now they are slathered on the back of their vehicles in the form of a bumper sticker or five. Oboma, McCain, country first, change, marriage, abortion, peace, and drilling are dispersed liberally among the cheapest beaters and the priciest SUV's. As an employee who pulls peoples car around as… Continue